Reading With Robin: Moses Brown’s 2015 Book Festival with Distinguished Poet & Essayist Mark Doty
Sunday, April 26, 2015
The Moses Brown Book Festival is coming to the Walter Jones Library on Thursday, April 30 and Friday, May 1. What started over thirty years ago as a fall event in Lower School, the Book Festival is now an all-school event for both students and parents. This year, the Parents’ Association has worked with the English department and the school librarians to merge the long-standing tradition of the book fair with the Moses Brown Poetry Initiative. Throughout the spring, Upper School students have worked with both middle and lower school students to read, explore, and write poetry as a discipline that asks us to observe, decode, analyze and, ultimately, to think differently about the world around us. These months of cross-divisional work will culminate in a reading by Mark Doty, the New York Times bestselling author of nine books of poetry, and winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. This reading will be held in Alumni Hall on May 1 at 7pm and is free and open to the public.
The book fair will be open in Walter Jones from 11:00am to 4:00pm on Thursday, April 30, and from 11:00am to 6:30pm on Friday, May 1. Providence bookseller, Books On The Square will provide books. There will be faculty-recommended titles for parents and students in all three divisions, as well as journals designed by Inspired By It. Proceeds from the Book Festival will benefit the Walter Jones Library.
On April 30th, third grade is leading a campus-wide celebration of the national Poem-In-Your-Pocket Day. Each child will carry two poems in their pocket on April 30 – one to keep and one to share. On Friday May 1, two outstanding children’s book authors and illustrators will be visiting Moses Brown and working with all students in the lower school, Nursery – 5th grade: New York Times bestselling children’s book author and illustrator Tad Hills, and Lucinda Landon, author of the Meg Macintosh Mystery Series. Also on May 1, during the school day, Visiting Poet Mark Doty will be working with Upper School and Middle School Students.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTAt 3pm, on May 1, the Upper School Senate is holding a Senate Sundae in the Back Circle, an ice cream fundraiser, the proceeds of which will be donated to Rhode Island non-profit Books Are Wings. The All-School Art Show will also open at 3pm in Sinclair, and the Friends Tea will be held in Ross House. May 1 is also the kick-off to Quaker Makers, a month-long celebration of creativity at Moses Brown with concerts, performances, and exhibitions in music, theater, art, and engineering.
There is a lot happening at Moses Brown School April 30th and May 1st, all in celebration of the love of reading and beloved books! I checked in with some of the wonderful people who make it all possible.
Dawn Tripp, Moses Brown Parent and Presiding Clerk of the Parents Association:
I’ve always loved the long-standing tradition of the Lower School Book Fair, which brought children’s book authors and illustrators in to work with every child in lower school from Nursery – 5th. I have also always loved the Annual Visiting Poet Series. Last year we had Phillip Levine come to speak. We have had Sharon Olds, Naomi Shihab Nye, Billy Collins. This year, when I found out we were having Mark Doty, one of my favorite contemporary poets, I thought: what if we take these two long-standing traditions and merge them into one all-school spring event that is a culmination of all the outstanding work our teachers have done with our children in the classroom throughout the year?
Moses Brown is such an unusual community in that you can have an idea like that, you can share it with a few teachers, a few parents and librarians, and the next thing you know you have all the support you need to help create a school-wide event that is a true celebration of our collective passion for books, poetry and literature, and our faith in the power of words.
Maureen Nagle – Middle School English Teacher:
In our English classrooms in the middle school we talk frequently about the values of reading and offer students daily opportunities to read for pleasure. We make time for reading because we value it and know that sending this particular message to students is the cornerstone of growing life-long readers. We also know that it's essential to create spaces for students to talk with each other about what they're reading and why they're reading, which is why students write and present book talks to each other and participate in cross-grade reading groups.
What our spring book festival does is send the message that reading isn't just valued in our classrooms and it isn't just valued by teachers. It tells our students that our entire community values what they are doing every day. It gives credence to the messages about reading they're hearing all the time, but we're sending it in a fresh new way. And isn't that what spring is for? A time to refresh our collective consciousness, to bathe ourselves in the language that inspires us, helps us wonder about the glorious world around us. And when we embark on this adventure together as a whole community the journey is made richer for all. Whether it's a 7th grader talking with an 11th grader about the values of the sonnet form or a 10th grader playing a rhyming game with a first grader on the playground, we bear witness to the power of language to bring us together and experience the pure rush of joy that comes from the creative process.
Ruffin Powell – Moses Brown Librarian
Part of what we do in the library is to bring together communities of readers, celebrating together an activity that is so often solitary. Authors generally write alone. Readers commune with authors, but seldom in the author’s presence. Meeting the person whose mind and cherished creation we have entered, have spent time with, is magical and mind-bending. We also connect readers with other readers, and a book festival fosters and nurtures those encounters. Especially sweet are the book recommendations the bridge age-groups: adults connecting to teens, teens reminiscing with younger students, students pointing out recommended books to us for our own library collection, “Do you have this? We need it!” and “Can you give this to my mom? I think she would really like it.” We librarians talk about the library being the heart of the school, and, being a Quaker school, we know the value of the pause, the silence, between beats. The book festival is the pulse, the thump of energy that reinvigorates our community of readers.”
Carolyn Garth – 5th Grade Teacher
We have been reading our latest core novel through the lens of Nonviolence. As we have read it, I have been trying to help the students gain, through their reading, a better understanding of what non-violence is. I am hoping they are each creating a personal sense of “What nonviolence means to me.” Our essential question through this work is: “How can we walk the walk and talk the talk of nonviolence?
As part of our class poetry unit, they will be using poetry to express and communicate their ideas about nonviolence and about our essential question. The challenge is that these are abstract ideas, which will perhaps get lost in poetry which can itself become abstract when young writers write it. I am hoping that reading some of Mark Doty’s poems can show them how to start with something very concrete as a way to talk about bigger ideas.
Mark wrote an essay, Should on Ice, about this idea as it connects to his poem “A Display of Mackerel.” While many of his poems are too difficult for my fifth graders to access, I think there are a few, like “A Display of Mackerel,” and, “Signal” which they will be able to understand. Hopefully, after showing them how well these poems move from the concrete to metaphor, I will be able to help them write poems describing what they understand about nonviolence following a similar model.
Upper School English Teacher Karen Lustig –
The English Department at Moses Brown offers a vertical curriculum: same skills, only they become more challenging, nuanced and complex as the kids’ critical and creative abilities develop. Pairing older kids with younger allows social interaction and role modeling - but also the chance for each student to view their academic goals or revisit their academic history. As for the reason we focus on poetry, my feeling is that no other discipline offers as much creative and critical opportunities (as writer and reader) as poetry does. Poems offer everything novels and stories do but in intensified, distilled form. As I like to tell my kids, mass media is like shouting at someone (you don’t need to listen hard to hear it), novels are like an ordinary conversation – a give & take dialogue, but poetry is a whisper which demands intimacy and active listening and which creates community between speaker and listener. It recreates rather than evokes, builds rather than plans.”
Laura Hunt – 3rd Grade Teacher
On April 30th, third grade is leading a campus-wide celebration of the national Poem-In-Your-Pocket Day – the last day of National Poetry Month. We have begun choosing poems from selections we found on the American Academy of Poet’s web page. Once the poems are copied onto colorful paper, third graders will roll them up and tie them with fancy yarn. In Art, we have been busy making little woven pockets to carry the poems in. We are hoping that people will find our poems to be as magical as we do! Each child will carry two poems in their pocket on April 30 – one to keep and one to share. We will also put several poems into bags that we’ll place strategically around campus. With visiting authors and our Book Festival, there will be lots of excitement for poetry! Judging from third graders’ response to Poem In Your Pocket Day last year, we are anticipating that it will help build fond memories for this year’s group as well.
I checked in with Ransom Griffin, Upper School English Teacher, and asked about the Visiting Poet Series.
“The Visiting Poet Series started in 1995 with the reading of Lucille Clifton. From the beginning the English Department crafted writing assignments in which senior AP English students mentored ninth graders in the production of a poem reflecting the compositional theory and techniques of the visiting poet. Past poets include US Poet Laureates, Billy Collins and Philip Levine, Coleman Barks, Sharon Olds, Taha Muhammad Ali, CD Wright, Forrest Gander, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Sekou Sundiata, Kurtis Lamkin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Thomas Lux, Patricia Smith and Martin Espada. The series is based on the assumption that reading and writing poetry is the best way to understand us and how language works.”
Now, to the man of the hour, Mark Doty. I checked in with Mark in anticipation of his visit to Rhode Island. I had so many questions for him here are just a few:
Robin- What is your connection to Rhode Island if any? What would you like to see and or do while visiting?
Mark- A dear old friend lived in Little Compton and then in Providence for many years, and visiting her anytime was wonderful, but of course especially in summer. I used to live on Cape Cod, and I’d frequently drive to New York, so Providence was an important stop: good coffee, good bookstores, ethnic food!
Robin- Were you one of those children who was always reading/writing poetry?
Mark- No, I didn’t start reading it till high school. I loved to read though; right from the time I could, but as a kid I liked fantasy, science fiction and stories about animals. When I was in high school I sort of stumbled onto poets whose work fascinated me: Tu Fu, e e cummings, William Blake, William Butler Yeats, and Federico Garcia-Lorca.
Robin- What are some misconceptions about poetry in terms of accessibility?
Mark- That it’s only for a special audience, or that you need a particular kind of education to enjoy it. Poetry is wildly diverse, and I firmly believe that there’s a poet for everyone. People often don’t know where to start. If you’re interested but don’t have a clue, I’d look at one of Robert Pinsky’s anthologies from the Favorite Poem Project. He collected poems Americans love, and those books are a storehouse of wonderful poems. Try reading a poem out loud, the first time you encounter it; that will help you to hear the way it’s working.
Robin- Tell me about your dog(s) and how you work them into your poetry. What is it about our animals that connect us so deeply?
Mark- I live with Ned, a five-year-old golden retriever, and George, a two year old Bedlington terrier (my first small dog, and a handful and a half. Because dogs pretty much dwell in the present, responding to whatever’s happening now, they bring my attention into the present; too. They wake us up to our senses, to the pleasure of being alive. And, of course, they get us out of the house no matter what the weather, these are all helpful things for poets. I think that the wordlessness of animals is very moving to human beings. We look into their eyes and see awareness, a mind and senses at work — and yet we know that consciousness isn’t quite like ours. This makes us more aware of ourselves as human beings; their difference makes us think more about who we are.
Robin- Have you ever written from a dog’s perspective?
Mark- Only once, in a poem called “Golden Retrievals,” in which a dog has some wisdom to impart about the uselessness of both the past and the future. It’s incredibly hard to write in a dog’s voice without sounding ridiculous.
Robin- I must ask you the expected -who are some of your favorite poets -poems? And what are you working on now?
Mark - I’ve been teaching an introductory course in reading poetry this semester, and doing so reminds me again and again of the great storehouse of human feeling and experience that poetry is. Reading Shakespeare and Andrew Marvell with my students, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Elizabeth Bishop — it’s just been pure pleasure. You never get tired of a great poem, because there’s always something new to discover there. The poet who matters most to me now is Walt Whitman, who wrote with great inventiveness and real daring; he wanted to change how his readers understood the world. I’m working on a prose book about reading his work now — something like a study of a relationship between poets over time, the ways his work and his life echo in mine.
ROBIN KALL is Rhode Island’s own book maven. From author interviews to events with best-selling authors, Robin shares her love of books wherever and whenever possible. You can connect with Robin on Facebook and follow her on Twitter and online on her website, which is updated constantly with all new author interviews and bookish information. Reading With Robin is on AM790 Fridays from 4-5pm and on I Heart Radio.
Coming up this Friday, May 1st Robin’s guest will be Miranda Beverly-Whittemore author of Bittersweet. May 5th New York Times Bestselling author Sarah McCoy will kick-off the release of her third novel The Mapmaker’s Children right here in Providence. Please check Reading With Robin “Events” for all of the events celebrating Sarah’s new novel!
Related Slideshow: Well-Read: Reading with Robin- Books I’m looking forward to This Year - Part One.
Ringing in the New Year means lots of things including adding on new books to your already top-heavy book stacks. No matter, a book that grabs my attention will never the less make its way to a list or a stack.
Here are eight books I'm looking forward to this year.
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